What will happen to 4th edition?

[Imaro]

Strawman much? You know, I remember AbdulAlhazrad telling me something about edition warriors that seemed pretty paranoid back in the 3e-4e era. But you've got me half convinced that my faith in humanity was misplaced and that AbdulAlhazrad had a point. So kudos to you! Keep up that rage-on, keep seeking out those threads discussing things that you know you don't like so that you can pee in others' Cheerios for the lulz! If only all fans were as unfaltering as edition warriors as you are, what would ENworld be like?

Again, if you want a thread that is only positive about 4e go create one, mark it as such and I'll respect that... however a general question was posed in this thread which I answered and I then decided to comment on what I thought of another posters assertions... exactly what everyone on ENworld does. No rage, no pissing in cheerios for the lulz and I'm not thread crapping or edition warring and if this thread was only for people who like 4e it should have been called out... In other words if I'm doing something against the rules of ENwolrd please by all means report the post. If not...how about you cool it with the pseudo-mod behavior and the personal attacks of edition warrior name calling... seems I'm not the one raging, you're making it personal while I'm talking about a game.

 

[prosfilaes]

3.5 wasn't that successful. It haemoherraged players and market share after the initial books. 3.5 is the second shortest lived version of D&D ever (beating only 3.0). Pathfinder has already lasted longer than 3.5 did.

Why do you think it hemorrhaged players? I've never seen any evidence that most players didn't move from 3.0 to 3.5, and many of them bought the splatbooks. Likewise, who was taking market share? Even if sales were dropping, I don't know of any real competitor in the market at the time. A bunch of petty things, a bunch of historically significant things, but nothing like WoD or Pathfinder.

 

[Bluenose]

Its odd in that it is such a generalized system. RQ's system, for instance, has been used in a LOT of games (though it is rather dated now) and even has a 'generic' incarnation in BRP. Traveller always FELT like a general-purpose system that could handle anything that BRP could. Certainly you could do cyberpunk/steampunk, nano-tech/transhumanist ala Eclipse Phase (frankly I just used Traveller's rules, much cleaner), sci-fi 'space horror', straight up horror, detective stories, etc. Heck, a lot of those you don't even need any real new material for, all the RULES you need to play in say 1930's New York exist already, you just need setting material and adventures. Yet oddly, of all the early successful RPG developers, GDW alone made no attempt to extend their product line out of its one niche. They could have at the very least provided some supplements on using Traveller in other classic sci-fi settings like say Asimovian Galactic Empire, Known Space, etc.

Well, probably because most of the other GDW games used a different rules system, which eventually Traveller: the New Era got as well. That included Twilight 2000, Dark Conspiracy, and 2300AD.

I imagine there'd also have been licencing issues for Known Space (Chaosium had that; Ringworld was rather good) and other published SF settings which they weren't prepared to address. Sticking to the 3I and allowing other companies to produce offical material for it gave them more control, and it's not as if the rules needed a huge amount of adaptation for the character parts of other settings - the equipment did, although there were some alternative options published in JTAS and Challenge (and even the Digest, iirc). I suspect that desire to support alternative settings with appropriate equipment may have played a part in their failure to provide different options for the game.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Why do you think it hemorrhaged players? I've never seen any evidence that most players didn't move from 3.0 to 3.5, and many of them bought the splatbooks. Likewise, who was taking market share? Even if sales were dropping, I don't know of any real competitor in the market at the time. A bunch of petty things, a bunch of historically significant things, but nothing like WoD or Pathfinder.

I think its not so much that they saw a 'hemorrhaging of players' as that they saw a bad demographic trend. Players are getting older and slowly dropping away. Some just leave the hobby and aren't replaced, some go to play newer more modern styles of games that require less time commitment and have lighter rules.

WotC also perceived that they COULD get players back with a new edition, at least for a time. Lapsed players and ones that don't buy a lot of stuff will buy a core book or two. So the tried and true formula of an edition roll was at work, not because 3.x was 'dead' at all, but because they can't sell anymore 3.x product.

However, I think there was another subtle factor at work here. Someone said that 3.5 was a move in the direction of codifying the presentation of game elements in a somewhat MMO-esque sort of way. Certainly a way that is more amenable to presenting things in an application and using it in software, even if its tools not games. Frankly I think 3.x was not really well-suited to that. In some fundamental ways the game is awkwardly 'broken'. The giant sprawl of material was built on top of a core that has some fundamental and unfixable issues with playability and presentation. WotC wanted to wipe the slate clean. They wanted to 'fix' the game. They saw the 3e design as awkward, somewhat antiquated, and hard to support. Its HARD to write material for 3e. Most of the obvious material has been written, and frankly a lot of it was written badly (certainly in a mechanical sense). If you're going to clean it all up, you need and WANT a new edition.

Then there was the whole political thing with the product line and wanting to be a 'major product'. Every element fit together. Nowhere in WotC was there a vested interest in the status-quo of 3.5, and given that they already did 3.5 a 3.7 was not really a likely path. It wouldn't have addressed all the stakeholders, except the ones that really have the weakest say, players.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Well, probably because most of the other GDW games used a different rules system, which eventually Traveller: the New Era got as well. That included Twilight 2000, Dark Conspiracy, and 2300AD.

Yeah, I thought it was both bland and overly complicated. I have a copy of 2300AD floating around somewhere. Never bothered to play it, and I'd have definitely preferred it to have used the Traveller system vs the Twilight 2K one. I really never got into Chadwick's settings either. It was all way too much all about guns and the minute details of each kind of gun.

I imagine there'd also have been licencing issues for Known Space (Chaosium had that; Ringworld was rather good) and other published SF settings which they weren't prepared to address. Sticking to the 3I and allowing other companies to produce offical material for it gave them more control, and it's not as if the rules needed a huge amount of adaptation for the character parts of other settings - the equipment did, although there were some alternative options published in JTAS and Challenge (and even the Digest, iirc). I suspect that desire to support alternative settings with appropriate equipment may have played a part in their failure to provide different options for the game.

Yeah, it seemed odd that they really never did anything with that.

 

[Zardnaar]

Why do you think it hemorrhaged players? I've never seen any evidence that most players didn't move from 3.0 to 3.5, and many of them bought the splatbooks. Likewise, who was taking market share? Even if sales were dropping, I don't know of any real competitor in the market at the time. A bunch of petty things, a bunch of historically significant things, but nothing like WoD or Pathfinder.

There was a d20 crash in 2004, 3.5 sold around 50-70% of 3.0. Eric Mona back in March or April revealed these figures.
3.0 500k PHB
3.5 250-350k PHB estimate
Pathfinder (2013) 250k PFRPG core book sold

One estimate of 4E that I do not know how reliable it is put 4E in the 50-100k PHB books sold by comparison. Ryan Dancey in a recent interview (August) estimated D&D is now around 1/3rd of the size that is was in 2000 which puts the 4th ed books estimate +DDI subscriptions of 60-80k in that range as well.

Later 3.5 books plummeted in quality so I would not be surprised if there was a drop off there. What people probably wanted in 2008 though was a fixed 3.5 game, not something completely different though. There was also a difference between online posting and how the casuals played the game on the street. I have never heard of Pun Pun actually ruining a real game of 3.5.

2004 Also had WoW being a problem/influence, and I do not see a .5 edition selling as much as 3.0 which was almost the 80's back again in terms of sales. 3,5 was always planned for apparently but they brought it forward 2 years. Doing that also pissed off game stores who now had large stocks of 3.0 and d20 product they could not shift. So bloat WoTC/d20, a .5 editions, d20 crash and WoW landing all in the same time frame had an impact.

 

[pemerton]

unlike a lot of other folks when I look at 5th edition D&D I see not warmed over 2nd edition or 3rd edition, but a lot of retooled Essentials presented to make it look like 3rd edition (and rescaled down from +level to +prof bonus, of course). The classes seem to still be built on a powers framework, but they're actively hiding the fact that there's a powers framework from the players this time around even more than they did with Essentials. One that just jumps out to me is the "multiple subclasses" thing - they're basically just different Essentials builds with a different presentation style for the powers for that build. (The powers framework seems more like 13th age than 4e to me, in that each class's powers have a lot more quirky individual ticks to them so that there isn't the uniformity of play across classes like you get with 4e, but its there if you look for it.)

the more I look at the 5e classes, the more I see a consistent structure within the powers framework for each class. It's not a hodge-podge, but it is absolutely presented to make it look like a hodge-podge. Which might seem crazy (why would you want to make your game look like a quasi-random collection of ideas?) until you remember that the community at large rejected a number of different things about 4e design and among those things was the regulated structure of class design.

<snip>

the concepts are there. They're obfuscated so that people who thought they hated them don't realize that they're using them, but they're there.

What has changed is the presentation. In 4e the developers were very open with the design and treated the players as fellow game developers. This backfired on them horribly, and so for 5e they seem to have taken the approach that they're going to hide all of the implementation details under a layer of obfuscation so that the players who hated having the curtain pulled back and the guts of the system exposed don't see it. Essentials started this approach - the engine under Essentials is the same as earlier 4e, but the options are fixed down a path so that players who don't care about (or worse - get actively angry at) all of the levels of customization don't have to worry about it. Essentials also started the approach that class powers were going to feel differently per class rather than having all powers have the same feel - and 5e has continued on that path as well. (13th age also picked up on this

<snip>

But it's core is recognizably on the same design path that the last 15 years of D&D have been walking down. It's just that now you have to sit with the book and reverse engineer things to figure out what the core is because the design team has hidden it from us.

I think this is very interesting. And somewhat plausible.

I haven't done a lot of 5e analysis, but have done a little bit and have read threads from others who have done it. They certainly seem to have tried hard to achieve a degree of combat balance in the 4e style, though with more asymmetric power suites. For me, it is the apparent lack of meaningful "utility powers" for non-casters, plus the overpowerd nature of some of the legacy utility powers for casters, which is the biggest issue.

Plus - as AbdulAlhazred has pointed out upthread - the lack of action resolution rules for very much outside of combat and simple exploration.

I think I agree that there is a certain aesthetic of game design that is probably MM at work that informs Essentials and 5e, but I don't think 5e really incorporates anything significant from 4e. The elements of the classes present in 5e all have direct antecedents in earlier editions and while you can call the idiosyncratic hodgepodge of class features each 5e class has 'powers' I don't see how they have anything to do with 4e's powers, which the very point of was that they were modular and swappable etc. Granted that E-classes had a lot of more hard-coded options, but that's exactly the way in which they undermine the very central concept of 4e

I agree with you that a lot of the Essentials class design, and even moreso the presentation, is a retreat from 4e "values".

But I think that is consistent with what Jer is saying about 5e - it is not 4e-esque, it is Essentials-esqu with the 4e-isms that Essentials retained stripped away (or, rather, covered over in layers of obfuscation).

in any edition you as the DM can always wave your hand and say "X doesn't work here" and when people ask why, you say "because I said so." But I believe that with a particular setup like this, 5E sets a higher bar than 4E in terms of "why doesn't this work."

<snip>


In 4E, the categorizations, the keywords, the power sources; these were NOT metagame.

<snip>

I think the tags in 4E provided an underlying connection, not to the rules, but to the game world. 5E lacks that underlying connection. Without it, the disbelief bar for how an anti-feature zone functions than an anti-keyword zone.

QFT. Many critics of 4e, and even some fans, seem to me not to have fully appreciated the importance of keywords in linking 4e mechanics to the game's fiction. Obviously you are not one of those people!

 

[Sunseeker]

QFT. Many critics of 4e, and even some fans, seem to me not to have fully appreciated the importance of keywords in linking 4e mechanics to the game's fiction. Obviously you are not one of those people!

I have to admit, I don't think it really clicked for me until I wrote that out.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think this is very interesting. And somewhat plausible.

I haven't done a lot of 5e analysis, but have done a little bit and have read threads from others who have done it. They certainly seem to have tried hard to achieve a degree of combat balance in the 4e style, though with more asymmetric power suites. For me, it is the apparent lack of meaningful "utility powers" for non-casters, plus the overpowerd nature of some of the legacy utility powers for casters, which is the biggest issue.

Plus - as AbdulAlhazred has pointed out upthread - the lack of action resolution rules for very much outside of combat and simple exploration.

I agree with you that a lot of the Essentials class design, and even moreso the presentation, is a retreat from 4e "values".

But I think that is consistent with what Jer is saying about 5e - it is not 4e-esque, it is Essentials-esqu with the 4e-isms that Essentials retained stripped away (or, rather, covered over in layers of obfuscation).

Yeah, like I said, I think stylistically there's a lot in common between Essentials and 5e, they are mostly the work of the same hand. And honestly I wasn't one of the 4e fans that had a big chip on my shoulder about e-classes, though I think they did 'break' a few aspects of the game somewhat. Again, the same issue exists with 5e and (to a lesser extent) Essentials. You no longer have a uniform power structure rule to hang other rules off of. This is why the suggestion that 5e classes are modelled so as to have roughly the play value and options of an e-class doesn't do much for me. The whole point was how easy the power system made it to hook into the rules and how easy it was to UNDERSTAND the rules in a design sense so you could poke at them. I don't appreciate obtuseness and lack of generality in a system. IMHO it leads to excess bloat and loophole problems later on.

QFT. Many critics of 4e, and even some fans, seem to me not to have fully appreciated the importance of keywords in linking 4e mechanics to the game's fiction. Obviously you are not one of those people!

Well, its not like previous editions LACKED the same sort of connection, it just wasn't a generalized rule, with all the system baggage that brought. Read the 1e Flametongue description and the 4e version and you will see what I mean. Clearly the later is a lot more robust and clear. I will observe too that the 4e version doesn't bother to tell you all the other narrative stuff that the 1e version does. I guess the assumption was that the DM would be clever enough to know that a 'fire' keyword signifies the actual presence of fire with all its narrative implications. Unfortunately nowhere in 4e is this linkage actually spelled out. This was a missed opportunity as they could have reinforced the narrative aspect by saying things like "fire burns things, a flaming weapon or fire keyword spell can start fires, provide light, ignite flammable things, etc". 1e of course famously had a whole cumbersome subsystem they attached here that was rarely used, but the 4e DM could have been at least given some nice options. I almost never saw actual 4e players/DMs make this connection themselves.

EDIT: I'd also like to point out that this is where spells IN PARTICULAR, since they have lots of keywords, should have hooked most strongly into the narrative. I could see 4e having provided a whole system for this, for instance telling you what the likelihood of fires starting was, how much ice a cold spell of a certain damage might produce, what the acid from an acid spell might do (beyond item damage), etc. The item damage rules in DMG1 were a bit of a start, and I think the IDEA was players would use the skill system/page42/SCs to tie this stuff together, but it was really never pulled all into a single spelled-out working system.

As an example one of my players had to exterminate a bunch of jermlaine in a dungeon that were infesting ventilation shafts. She used Stinking Cloud to do this by applying an SC to turn it into a ritual that let her make the cloud flow into the shafts and fill them. This is an application of tying poison to the narrative via the mediation of the SC rules, but this kind of thing is completely ignored in the actual text of 4e. It is totally implicit.

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

In all fairness Imaro is pretty tame, the general tenor of what we used to call the 'h4ters' back in those days was pretty low.

Lol, yeah, Imaro has to be pretty tame to avoid the mod squad. But he's determined! I followed this thread when it was new, then got distracted for a week. When I came back, I found page after page of the point-by-point nitpickery, mostly between you and Imaro.

I'm not criticizing anyone, mind; there's nothing wrong with in-depth discussion. Just wondering what makes someone think "Yes, seeking out threads of editions I don't like to post essay-length diatribes about it is an excellent use of my time."

Again, if you want a thread that is only positive about 4e...

I don't recall wanting that.

Flame on bro.